Quote:
Originally Posted by tweetiepooh
Church history is next year but one cause of divide between the Eastern and Western churches was over a small change to a creed. The western churches wanted to amend a clause about The Holy Spirit - "from The Father" to "from The Father and The Son". The filioque clause.
The issue to the eastern churches was not so much the theology but that the change was to be imposed by the pope without consultation.
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True, and the difference persists to this day (I happen to think the Roman Catholic view was correct, and the Orthodox only omit it out of pique). The difference is technical and makes no difference to the daily lived experience of any Christian anywhere.
However it is of minimal significance to the wider reasons for differences in Russian culture from the rest of Europe. That has far more to do with Western Europe’s easy ability to transmit ideas right up to the renaissance period in Latin, because this had been enforced as the ecclesial language across western Christianity. It was not the official language in the east, which actually didn’t have one single language at all. In some places Koine Greek (the language the New Testament was actually written in) persisted, but in Eastern Europe, including Russia, Church Slavonic was the ecclesial language.